TV producers wanted AI rights of extras forever, says union
TV producers wanted AI rights of extras forever, says union
Union prez Fran Drescher thinks Hollywood’s digital desires have no style or flair
Sadly, I think they will get them, one way or another.
All it will take is a handful of people desperate for money agreeing to be 3d scanned, and maybe a few months of interns saying yes/no to particular faces, and bam, hundreds of extras ready to be used and abused for decades to cover.
Which is why these union negotiations are so important. Sure, that will probably happen. But if SAG-AFTRA says they can’t be used on union shows, well, they won’t be lol
When I first started in film any time I had a SAG actor there were requirements I had to adhere to for their pay and hours, no exceptions. And I live in a right to work state!
And I live in a right to work state!
Right-to-work is the work-for-welfare program. I would imagine it would have no impact on people who aren't applying for social services.
I'm assuming the overlap between right-to-work and at-will-empmloyment states is a near perfect circle, though. And the fun thing about at-will employment is that it's totally nullified by an actual, mutually negoatiated employment contract, with, like, responsibilities laid on the employer and consequences for failing to perform them. You know, like what you get with a strong union.
Crowd extensions are already pretty common with traditional VFX techniques.
I worked in Hollywood editorial for a bit and, IMO, the producers are playing up the AI stuff so that said stuff can be given to the writers and actors as a "victory" instead of the real spectres in the room:
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streaming residuals need to get the same payout and transparency as home video and syndication did
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streaming numbers need to be made available to creators to facilitate the above.
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the 'mini-room' system that totally disconnects writers from the productions they are writing for needs to be broken down.
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Scabs are the worst.
Why wouldn't they just use pure cgi generated faces? Apparently it's not hard.
I think a combination of 3d animation and 'ai postprocessing' is probably the most effective result.
As much as I respect the rights of extras, they are expensive and easier to replace than lead actors. Disney already has things setup so extras never have to be on set with your lead actors, although you get a lot of backgrounds with 'people just walking back and forth with no purpose', but a bit more effort will mean those prefilmed backgrounds wont even require human actors, they barely do already.
Or they’ll pay people to be part of scans that an AI uses to generate extras
They’ll charge people extra at the theater to be scanned and then digitally inserted into the movie in real time.
Yep, union can hardly stop that with a union contract and people will do it since they are not invested.
Funny that studios did not bother avoid this easily avoidable fight but it does show you how they think if of their slave... I mean work force.
They behave like they own you lol
Hopefully people end up owning their likeness regardless if it’s a lengthy contract and are made to be paid fairly and compensated for streaming rights as well. I feel like we are approaching same time frame as non compete clauses becoming illegal in comparison to AI generated images/actors. They are already working to make their likeness illegal to be used for pornography. IMHO I think the actors and the writers s tricking together signifies a united front and could force change as long as the powers to be don’t bleed them out beforehand, but I’m hopeful with suck a strong backing social media wise and industry (the workers not the owners).
Eventually the cg tech will get good enough that digital people can be used cheaply without even scanning anyone
Who needs a body scan or LIDAR data? Just use an LLM to make one up
I don't really see a problem with this. Is it so much different from making a good 3D model?
We're talking about assets that will be used for generating massive crowds. That's already done with CGI. These scans aren't even "AI"... they're just like metahumans in Cryengine.
This guy just put the term AI on it because it freaks everyone out.
If you take the $200 for a motion and body scan and you sign your rights away, that's what you get. This isn't a change to how Hollywood already operations. Fear-mongering for nothing.
That's not what's happening here. These extras are being paid the same to act in the background of a shot, just like always, but the studio expects them to give up the rights to their likeness forever after so they can try to replace them.
The studio expects the extras to participate in the destruction of this job with nothing in return.
I find it hard to believe that an industry that uses the Wilhelm scream repeatedly, everywhere, for over 70 years would suddenly want to reuse AI generated extras…
At this point it feels more like an easter egg than an actual sound effect
Which was always the intent, more or less. It was just kind of a tradition amongst audio engineers to use it once in every film. It had nothing to do with the studios.
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Rev Animated face.
Rev Animated face everywhere.
It’s like that black mirror episode with Ann Murphy salma hayeck
I had to double check if this was the onion cause this is EXACTLY like Joan is Awful
Good show.
You know what? Make a new hollywood with real writers and real actors, lets see how long an AI trained on stale old stuff is going to be at creating a cohesive story with genuine emotion.
I understand what bard, chatgpt, the image one can do but these are not going to break new frontiers anytime soon - the free market will sort it out im tired or the same old shit regurgitated in new formats because fucking execs are too scared to try anything new.
Uncanny vally is going to make this fun.
They’ll take ‘saving money’ up front over the fear of creeping out an audience and losing more money in the long run. The producers wasn’t fiction. it was a documentary.
As an indie writer/producer, shit is hard to get made and distributed. It is expensive af, kind of like weddings. Once you mention film, the price shoots through the roof. Even daily insurance on a film set is 800/day on the lower end, not including stunts. And after Rust, if you’ve got real guns on set, good luck even getting insurance (work comp specifically).
FYI: even real guns are called prop guns on set
Note that what they're really interested in here is a fundamental change in how extras work. They want to turn it from an industry that hires early/struggling actors and turns it into the sort of thing that a college student can get one-time emergency money from. Akin to selling blood or eggs.
Also akin to Uber drivers, door dash delivery people, Airbnb hosts (back in the beginning)
At that point, why license the likeness of real people instead of just using an AI generated face?
"We can't figure out a way to make money without owning your body," - Rugged entrepreneurs
Absolutely none of this is new.
I assume most people are too young to remember Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The big deal with that was that the lead actress (voiced by the ever spectacular Ming-Na Wen) was a fully CG actress and would do interviews with magazines and was going to be a real actress in other films and blah blah blah. Then the movie was god awful and everyone forgot about that.
But this has been the goal of "hollywood" for decades. Have actors/actresses that are literally not people. No chance of controversies or cancellations. And you can even use the modern vtuber model except instead of "graduating" to a new company, you push the models to much more degrading shit to cash in on the mrskin crowd.
And this is very much a trap (card). Very few starving extras will be dumb enough to sign their rights away forever. But what about a contract where the studio has the rights to reuse footage made in the next year or so, but no new footage after that? Congratulations, you are now part of a legally owned and curated training data database.
And that is what I expect to be the norm. Because even "real" actors and actresses might agree to that. "Oh, okay, you want to use an AI generated model so I don't have to fly back to Morocco to do reshoots? Cool. And you agree to not generate new footage of me after this shoot and to not use any footage of me that I have not agreed to? Sure, that sounds awesome. Oh, you need me to sign this specific contract to that specific wording? Cool. I'll go film a Batman movie while you figure out how to make it look like I kissed that abusive piece of shit or whatever you are doing"
Same with actors/actresses agreeing to let their rights be used, but only for movies they agree to. Sounds great for them. No risk of selling cyber condoms in forty years, and they get a paytcheck now. But, again, the goal is training data.
Like, it is no shock that we are seeing these "we own the rights to you for all time" stories while a strike is inevitable/occurring. Because this is setting a low bar so that a "compromise" can be reached.
I assume most people are too young to remember Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
I'm certainly not. The problem there was that it didn't live up to the hype. It was in no way photorealistic.
We now have websites that can create photorealistic faces. Photorealistic AI video is only a matter of time.
This was over 20 years ago. The frigging PS2 was "photorealistic" by the standards of the day. And for as shitty as the movie was narratively, it was visually MANY steps beyond that.
Saying it failed because it was not modern technology would be like arguing that early film should have failed because it was filmed at 16 FPS whereas now we can have full 60 FPS hobbit action.
There were plenty of reasons ranging from it being "sci-fi" at a time when that was a death sentence, the movie being a complete flop, and "Mulan" not being a leading lady because she was Asian. But folk lost their mind at how "realistic" whatsherface's model was.
Which, tinfoil hat, is why I suspect Villeneuve and the like keep getting the budget to do those completely spectacular sci-fi films with the top stars of the day.
Note that though AI is the new hotness and grabs headlines, this a) doesn't actually apply only to AI and b) has been done for at least a decade.
Many actors have refused such clauses (I know Sam Jackson is one of them) but many have not.
Putting actor's faces on CGI bodies has been something Hollywood has been working on for a long time, and AI is just a tool that improves on what we've been doing for a while.
It's wonderful that Netflix is one of the corporations pushing to own a person's AI likeness forever.
Fran is saying we’re all going to be replaced by machines as if it’s the future but it’s being going on for a lot longer than now. Digidoubles replacing main actors a has been a mainstay in action movies for well over a decade.
When it comes to AI, It’s been tearing at the base of art (in general) for years before now. One of the more recent cases https://news.artnet.com/art-world/class-action-lawsuit-ai-generators-deviantart-midjourney-stable-diffusion-2246770
One of the reasons I’m excited about the fediverse is it means we can potentially have a server that artists can share their work safe away from the trawling AI machine.
Remember that commercial where Fred Astaire danced with a fucking vacuum cleaner?
The idea of someone using “me” in that way would, by itself, be enough for me to strongly oppose the idea.
"across the universe and for all eternity" was the wording if I recall correctly.The Industrial Revolution and its consequences...
This is why Jet Li turned down the Matrix. He didn't want his Kung Fu skills to be scanned and preserved in the WB archive.
I don’t think it’s going to matter much.
Pretty soon the AIs will be generating extras that aren’t based on anyone’s likeness.
Especially after watching the latest season of black mirror.